When running fluxbox 64megs memory used
 

When I startx and run fluxbox, I then run top, and I will get you a screen shot, if you will let me know how to copy the data in an xterm and paste it into one of these posts. But in top I notice that of my 64 megs of ram just about 60 of it is already used before I even start any major programs. Any suggestions.

thanks
shaun

Just click-drag your mouse over the term and then middle click in the browser - post it in [ code ] tags if you do. But just check the middle line of the output of 'free' under the 'used' and 'free' columns - that'll give you a little more accurate impression. I suspect you're just seeing total memory 'used' but most of that can be freed up on demand. Also, I assume you have a swap partition - again, some of that can be utilized at any time but if it's not full, you've still got some room. If it's almost empty, then your physical RAM-usage isn't all that high, either.

I don't think either one are particularly accurate, but top seems to be particularly iffy.

All that being said, 64 megs isn't a whole lot - if possible, adding more is always a good idea - it's just not always doable, either because of mechanics or money. ;) But I have booted to a GUI on 8MB and been able to use one on 32.

Last thought - you may be running too many unecessary processes that you could turn off to save memory.

In addition to what Digi said: Linux will pretty much
grab ALL memory, no matter what, and utilise it one
way or another. On my 512MB notebook I get the
following output.


Cheers,
Tink

Both of those posts are helpful. Thank you.

I do have swap space available, I just thought maybe there was a way to free up ram and force soemm of this stuff into swap space since it is very rarely used by linux. But maybe Linux is just showing me that it has used all my RAM.

I would like to post the top to see if anybody sees anything interesting that a newbie like myself wouldn't see, but when I tried to copy and paste my term window it wouldn't work. I only have two buttons and I found that with a two button pad, I have a laptop, you can hit both buttons at once. I tried this just to paste to a blank xterm, to a vim window and into my browser without luck. Any ideas? Where can I look at my mouse settings, maybe something in there is causing problems.

thanks again

Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config ...

Search for the
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "mouse"

If it's not enabled (commented out or
non-existing), enable Option "Emulate3Buttons"

And you shouldn't be worrying to much
about the usage of RAM or SWAP-space.
Linux is highly efficient at that, the kernel
developers did a marvellous job.



Cheers,
Tink

Here is the output from top on my linux machine. Can anyone let me know if any of this can be killed, or if anything looks wierd. I doubt it, but I gues we are all looking for more speed so this is where my endeavour has lead me.

thanks for the help.

[
23:05:05 up 9 min, 3 users, load average: 0.03, 0.15, 0.13
46 processes: 44 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 2.9% user 1.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 95.9% idle
Mem: 61688k av, 60788k used, 900k free, 0k shrd, 4484k buff
44380k actv, 0k in_d, 760k in_c
Swap: 196552k av, 1656k used, 194896k free 30328k cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
1877 root 14 -1 14612 8540 1372 S < 2.0 13.8 0:06 0 X
1973 root 21 0 2640 2640 1824 S 0.7 4.2 0:00 0 vim
1940 root 15 0 2928 2916 1964 S 0.4 4.7 0:00 0 xterm
1882 root 15 0 4872 4872 1968 R 0.1 7.8 0:01 0 xterm
1 root 15 0 96 68 44 S 0.0 0.1 0:04 0 init
2 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 keventd
3 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kapmd
4 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 ksoftirqd_CPU0
9 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 bdflush
5 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kswapd
6 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kscand/DMA
7 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kscand/Normal
8 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kscand/HighMem
10 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kupdated
11 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 mdrecoveryd
15 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kjournald
73 root 25 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 khubd
1182 root 16 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 kjournald
1441 root 15 0 204 164 120 S 0.0 0.2 0:00 0 syslogd
1446 root 15 0 72 24 20 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 klogd
1464 rpc 15 0 144 80 76 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 0 portmap
1483 rpcuser 25 0 168 136 84 S 0.0 0.2 0:00 0 rpc.statd
1538 root 24 0 184 184 32 S 0.0 0.2 0:00 0 cardmgr
1658 root 25 0 992 992 756 S 0.0 1.6 0:01 0 sshd
1669 root 23 0 316 316 200 S 0.0 0.5 0:00 0 xinetd
1678 root 15 0 124 124 72 S 0.0 0.2 0:00 0 gpm
1687 root 15 0 208 208 140 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 0 crond
1698 root 15 0 1424 1424 952 S 0.0 2.3 0:00 0 cupsd
1757 xfs 15 0 3004 2956 532 S 0.0 4.7 0:42 0 xfs
1766 root 39 19 104 104 20 S N 0.0 0.1 0:00 0 anacron
1775 daemon 15 0 196 196 132 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 0 atd
1782 root 16 0 520 520 304 S 0.0 0.8 0:00 0 login
1783 root 21 0 60 60 8 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 mingetty
1784 root 21 0 60 60 8 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 mingetty ]

Not sure what anacron is, but I think atd and crond are both task schedulers. Maybe all three. I think atd is supposed to be more versatile, but I just installed crond. If you're on a solo box, I don't think you need sshd - maybe not portmap, rpc.statd. If you don't print, you don't need cupsd. Not real sure about that or some others, but I'd look into turning some things off. Your top output looks a little different than mine (in fields - naturally the numbers differ) - so I'm not positive, but it looks okay. Like I say, the fact that you have any free physical RAM at all and have dipped into swap so little means you're basically okay. And you don't need to force stuff into swap to free up physical RAM. I know it's kind of like the opposite of a gas tank syndrome where you're worried if the 'tank' is *full* but, really, memory is there to be used and the kernel will shift a little to swap when convenient and shift a lot when it has to.

Maye Tink or someone will drop back by and give you specifics on those daemons. It doesn't seem like you're too overloaded but I suspect there is some trimming you could do.

Hi Digi,

and here I go again ;)

atd will allow you to run a unique task at a unique
time ... you can schedule it whenever you please
which makes it quite handy sometimes. I use atd
frequently for "alarm events" (Play a mp3 to get
myself of the machine at a given time :})

anacron does basically what cron does, with
the difference that anacron will also check jobs
that didn't run because the machine was shut-down,
and then run them at a time when the box is
reasonably idle. I don't use it though, and prefer
to decide manually whether or not to run a job
that had been sheduled for a time when the machine
was down.


Cheers,
Tink